The Beauty Game
There are a whole lot of ways to be perfect, and not one of them is attained through punishment.
If you are alive at this very moment, chances are you have participated or regularly participate in the beauty game. The beauty game, just like every game, has its rules. Be thin, eat healthy for your skin, straighten your hair, wave your hair, eliminate every hair that is not on your head, make sure you don’t lose the ones on your head, get yourself some freckles, eliminate cellulitis, wear heels to make your legs longer, use anti-wrinkle cream, look natural, look healthy, look sexy, don’t eat sugar … I could go on and on. The beauty rules change slightly with time, but they are always this: impossible to satisfy.
80% of women have tried dieting at least once; many say they are too self-aware to exercise; others confess they drink to feel comfortable with the way they look; 50% of girls smoke to suppress their appetite — is it enough to suggest that these things, these anxieties, are slowly killing us? This craziness has been around for a very long time. Ursula Le Guin wrote:
I think of when I was in high school in the 1940s: the white girls got their hair crinkled up by chemicals and heat so it would curl, and the black…
